by Chris Adrian
She shrugged again.
“I used to look out there and see all the dead people. I’d look straight down, just staring and staring, and eventually the faces would start to rise up, one at a time, so slowly, and they’d get closer and closer and I’d wonder if I knew them until they broke the surface and popped just like a bubble. I used to feel sorry for them, or sad. Not so much any more. Now I wonder what they did, and I know what they did, and all I can think is how all that water is barely enough to cover it up.”
“Don’t you have work to do?”
“I think this is it—it’s not a distraction, wanting to… I dream of such fabulous punishments, and nothing is ever enough.”
“Are you high?” Jemma asked. She always asked him, he always laughed at her.
“Have you ever seen a head squeezed and squeezed, harder and harder until…”
“Well, I have work to do,” Jemma said. “Unemployed, and work up to here. See you later!” But you hope never to see him again, and skip into a scurrying hurry when you hear him pounding his fist against the window. Don’t worry—not even he can break it. And don’t worry—it’s all right to find him so distasteful, though you pity him for being so upset all the time, he’s certainly not done you any favors lately. He is my brother but our bonds are not blood, and I don’t like him either, when he gets like this, pounding now with his hand and now with his head, biting his tongue and making little bloody o’s on the glass every time he strikes it with his face.
She always knew when somebody died. Never mind the angel’s flute, playing a universally hated tune that sounded to most ears like a mournful cell-phone ringer, or how she announced every death no matter how many people pleaded with her to shut up: “A great soul has passed! A great soul is flown from the earth! Celebrate this life!” During adult codes she was silent now, except that sometimes she would start to play her flute along with the alarm chimes, a slur on the code teams. But Jemma could feel them, too, every death a prick against her awareness, a complaint and a sadness in her head, and then a tearing sensation, like someone was peeling a band-aid off her face.
She tried not to go to them, but as they passed day two hundred and fifty at sea and they became more frequent, you could hardly avoid being present at one unless you stayed locked in your room, always an option for Jemma, who was usually pursued by the still-hale Arthur and Jude and still under an injunction of house arrest by the Council, even if they no longer tried to enforce it. She could stand less than ever to be in her room, lonely for Rob and for Pickie and for Vivian. Jemma was the only unemployed person in the hospital—every child too small to work was busy sleeping—so now she made wandering her full time occupation.
If only they knew, the ignorant morons who call you the angel of death, how very different you are from my littlest brother—if only they could see him, everywhere around them, or appreciate how deeply he is settled in them, ashes in the marrow of their bones. He is not a glowing pregnant lady in a yellow gown, green scrubs, and sparkly blue sneakers, who takes two steps toward the dying for every one step she takes away from them, a struggle plain on her face, grimacing or clenching her teeth but never smiling, like some people say she does. You have refined your art at every death, the fire growing thinner and more subtle until it is just an unease in the air, easily lost in the greater unease surrounding the death, the shouting and the hurried flurry of meds and compressions and the deployment of the wonderful and futile new machines, the liquid-respirator helmets and the implant-able LVADs and the nanobot solutions that every fourth or fifth death extend a life by another hour or day.
There she is again, they say when they see you leaning again against a wall, just beyond the code fray, staring at the patient. Like a ghoul, some say, but I know that blank look is on your face because you are looking beyond the physical, and that time you drooled at Dr. Walnut’s code was because you were trying so hard to patch up his ruptured abdominal aneurysm, and not because, like Dr. Sundae suggested, you were hungry for his soul. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” Arthur says to you sometimes, but it’s been weeks since they tried to pull you away by your arm. They think you still need to touch a person to wreak your havoc on them so as long as you stand at least ten feet away from the bed they leave you alone, and do not realize that the little swing in your hips is all you show of how tremendously you are pummeling at the botch. It’s extraordinary how hard you can work, and how little you can show it, and how a part of you can appreciate how pointless your effort is even as you enthusiastically exhaust yourself, and you think of all the other impossible things it is like, this impossible thing you are doing: folding a marshmallow in half, studying for a pharmacology exam, retracting to the satisfaction of a surgeon.
Jordan Sasscock was the first to die that day. For a long time he’d been on the way out, stuck in one of the ultra-critical care units on the fifth floor, sustained by one of the new floating respirators and still cognizant enough to continue to participate by remote proxy in Council meetings, and even as he was actively dying he was still enough present in his body and his mind to look fondly at his eight wives, to reach weakly for their hands and turn his cheek into their palms when they surged forward to touch him.
“He’s too young to die,” said Carla, the stupidest thing Jemma had heard in weeks, twenty-nine being ancient, everybody knew, in the new order where the botch spared no one over the age of twenty-one. The Council had made an official, preliminary declaration extending childhood until the twenty-fifth year—weren’t there young men and women of that age who acted as foolish and carefree as teenagers, and who were as innocent of the grosser accumulations of sin? Probably not, Jemma had said, though by that time she was already impeached, deposed, and locked up. The law saved no one.
Sasscock was still handsome, even with the tube in his nose and the respirator claws attached to his neck, the artificial kidneys hanging like two plastic eggplants from his waist, and his palms, as dry, black, and rubbery-looking as a gorilla’s. He still had his chin and his jaw, and he still had his appealing olivey smell, but he could hardly keep his eyes open and Jemma could feel an agonizing pain in his spine where the botch had eaten through the bone to rot on the cord. She stood by the door, tapping slowly with her foot, imagining a gauge for his pain, one of those huge fundraising thermometers, and brought the level down just a touch with every tap. It had to be slow enough for him not to notice it but fast enough to make a difference.
“It’s not fair,” said Carla, falling back out of the crowd and bending her neck to place her face in the crook of her arm. It was another obvious statement. Jemma did not know how to reply to it.
“Come on, Carla,” said Jordan. “Come on now, we talked about this. Everybody tell her.” Two of the women took her arm and drew her back to the ring around the bed, but no one spoke, except Musette, who merely reported that she was pushing some fentanyl-555. Five of the eight were nurses, and the other three had become experienced caretakers in the dormitory and the adult wards, though before the rain one had been a cafeteria cashier, one a lab tech, and the last the mother of three hemophiliacs, the youngest admitted for a head bleed after playing a forbidden game of football, and now sound asleep. Jordan coughed and smiled: Jemma gasped at the pain in his back. Carla glared at her.
“Come on now,” said Jordan. “Everybody cheer up. Let’s turn up the dopanephrine a little.” Dr. Tiller and the rest of the unit team were standing a few feet off, watching Jordan, but essentially letting him be. It was almost like he was running his own code, except that he was in a very particular sort of extremis, actively dying, Jemma was sure, but so jacked up on meds and potions and machines that he presented an appearance too calm and civil for a man in the process of divorcing his own body. Jemma felt a lurch. With a twist of her hand she deflected a high crest of pain—it made her laugh, not cry out, because it was a skillful blow and her best success in days.
“Just fucking shut up!” said Carla, turning to Jemma and th
rowing a bit of wadded gauze at her. Weighted with pus, it fell just at her feet.
“Sorry,” Jemma said, staring down at the ground. There was another lurch, and the dense botch in Sasscok’s abdomen suddenly detached from its moorings and rolled onto his aorta, drastically compromising the blood supply to his legs. “Oh,” he said quietly, and that motion seemed to set off a series of collapses elsewhere in his body. A little spot of botch in his lung grew and then collapsed, pulling his lung in on itself and away from his chest wall until it had shrunk to a nubbin. Another spot on his heart did the same thing, and blood began to trickle into his pericardium.
“Carla,” he said. “Don’t be gloomy. Musette, remember that I love you. Hannah, I love you too! I love everybody—don’t forget!”
Another little botch bomb exploded along his aorta, and he started to exsanguinate into his chest. Carla saw his pressure dropping and opened up his fluids while Musette hung hypernephrine on top of the dopa. Jemma ground her head into the wall, astounded by the extraordinary pain he was supposed to be suffering. Surely it was enough for your lung to collapse and your heart to leak and your great vessels to explode—it all hurt enough, by itself. Why pluck at his thalamus to make phantom agonies real? There was something too cruel about a plague like this—someone had to be in charge of it. She knocked her head softly on the wall three times, every knock a blow against an organizing principle she imagined but did not perceive.
They pushed more meds and more fluids, and hung the synthetic blood that Sasscock himself had perfected, but it ran out as quickly as they pushed it in, pouring from his bottom and his mouth, and they all kept going, bagging him and doing compressions and changing out his chest tubes when they clotted, until his brittling bones broke under their hands, his handsome face collapsed under the mask, and then under their resuscitating kisses, and he was like any of the others, a mess of blood and ash in the ruined shape of a person.
“I’m tired,” Rob said.
“I know,” said Jemma.
“I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s stupid and pointless. It only makes me more tired. Nothing else, nothing useful, nothing good. Just more tiredness and more death and more uselessness.”
“Exactly,” Jemma said.
“I’m going to stay in here forever.”
“Okay,” she said. They were in a linen closet on the seventh floor, a place Rob had modified to accommodate him in these dark moods. It had used to be Vivian’s place, discovered the night of their final trip, to which she’d return for little vacations not just when she was feeling sad, but also when she needed a quiet place to sit and consider her list. Lying under the shelves, cushioned by a layer of blankets and pillowcases, she said she could almost see the words written on the darkness, pale letters that burned brighter and brighter as she became more certain that she had found another offense. Rob had removed two of the shelves and lined the bottom with a thick gymnastics mat. This made it a more comfortable place to lie down, but also made the close space smell of sweaty boy.
“Or until we get out of here. Which is never, and forever.”
“I’ll stay here with you.”
“I don’t care who dies next. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Not a thing.”
“They can all just fuck off. The vents can fuck off, and the art lines can fuck off. The chest tubes and the foleys and the bypass machines. Fuck them all. Even the people underneath them, they can fuck off, too.”
“Fuck them all,” Jemma said.
“Double fuck them,” Rob said, and sighed, and Jemma imagined the double fucking, two-penised Rob striding naked through the hospital to thrust at the patients and the machines and the tubes, the patients and their sick, tired nurses and doctors. Only the children were spared the violence of the purple-headed twins. She laughed. “It’s not funny,” he said.
“I know.” It was too dark to see his face with her eyes. “Come here,” she said trying to grab at him with her toes: they were sitting with their backs at either wall of the closet. She picked at his shirt, and shoveled him toward her with the side of her feet.
“I don’t want to,” he said. “I like it over here. I just want to be alone, with you here. Just sitting like this in the dark, where nobody will find us, until the end.”
“Okay,” Jemma said, but she still kept pulling at him, with her fingers and her toes, her hands and her feet, with her body. She imagined a heaviness in the space between her legs, and a slow force reaching through the space between them to latch between his legs and draw her to him. He slowly moved, not grabbed by her imagination but because she knew he didn’t mean any of what he was saying. “I could grow you a double penis,” she said. “That would be something.”
“One’s enough,” he said, scooting close enough to press against her. She turned onto her side. He curled over her back.
“It’s not bad for the baby,” they said together, because Vivian had already told them that, and because they had read about it the old sources, and because they still needed to say it, even though they knew it, to make it even more true. She was only two weeks from term, but still it was careful and slow; they hardly moved, even when they weren’t doing it in a closet or on the roof or in the ER or yes, under the beds of the comatose. They hardly needed to move anymore, to make it happen for each of them, even though Jemma mostly kept her promise not to meddle with his fuck centers, and when she imagined herself playing a grand fugue upon his orgasmatron, it was merely an idle daydream, and when extraordinary pleasures became real for them it was almost none of her doing.
Her mind wandered, not away from the two of them, but further into them. Down and down, he pushed her further and further into a quiet place, where all the feelings in the hospital came sliding down to bump against her, and the hospital in her head was almost a perfect mirror of the hospital in the world, dwindling hope and mounting despair reflected in exact measure. “God fucking dammit,” Rob said. “Stupid motherfucking bastards. Fucking gummy-bear shitbird. God damn, God damn, God damn”—he built up frustration along with his his need for her, until it crested and broke. She felt thrown by it and washed by it. She gave a push with her mind—just a little one—and it was like she had reset him. He cried against her back and snotted down her neck and made noises that she could not understand as words, though she knew they were words. He was apologizing to her and to the patients, to his mother and his sisters, to Vivian and Dr. Sasscock and Pickie Beecher.
“Hush up,” she said, “it’s all right.”
It wasn’t though, not really. It was just getting worse and worse—she tried not to imagine the new horrors that were coming, the new ways in which the botch would twist their bodies and their minds, but it was like trying not to scratch an itchy scab, or worry a painful tooth. She’d seen it all and yet every day she was surprised by some new horrors, strange and dreadful in ways that were more subtle than she ever expected, eye spikes and dry rot in the mouth and regurgitant cloaca syndrome.
“That was horrible,” he said after a little while.
“The worst,” she said. “You suck at this.”
“You too. It’s like doing it with a smelly pillow.”
“Or a chicken bone.”
“Or a chair.”
“We may as well just give up,” she said.
“We may as well just lie down and die,” he said.
“Goodbye, stupid world.”
“Fuck you all.”
“Here we go,” she said. He pulled a blanket down from the shelf above them to cover their legs. They settled closer to each other and he was asleep before another minute had passed, his breathing deep and regular and slightly snoring, his arms twitching and his feet fluttering before growing still. Then he had fallen asleep, but Jemma lay awake, looking, though she always promised herself she wouldn’t, at the little bits of botch scattered throughout his body. It lay here and there in little dormant seeds, and she did not know if it was something she was doing that was keeping
it from blossoming horribly in him. It seemed ridiculous again, to think that her love had finally become protective of someone. Hello again, her baby said to her.
Hello, she said.
It’s not bad for me, you know. I barely notice. And I won’t remember, at all, when I’m older, about the hanky-panky.
I’m glad to hear it.
That’s not to say I want to, you know, be with you. I mean I was still hoping…
For somebody else.
Exactly. No offense.
None taken. Who knows better than me, all the reasons you should run and hide from me, after you get out?
A remarkably mature perspective.
I am older than you.
But that doesn’t always count for much.
Touché.
But while we’re on that subject. About the fellow there.
Yes?
Can you protect him? Can you protect me?
I don’t know, Jemma said.
And are you sure… are you really sure that it’s not you, after all, who’s causing all the trouble? What if this whole botch business is coming from you? You know, leaking out of your bottom at night while you sleep.
But it came from the boat.
Who can say, really, what came from the boat and what didn’t come from the boat?
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.
But you concede, don’t you, that maybe… just maybe… it would be best if he just sort of gathered me up and hurried away with me when the time comes. That we’d be better off without you?
Well…
I’m glad you understand.
But I didn’t…
It’s so nice to have a conversation with someone who is reasonable, and sane, and knows when to do the right thing.
But I…
I’m so glad we talked. I’m always so glad, after we talk.
Me too, Jemma said. Then she put her face in the blanket and wept.
